Hatfield Library News

Please join us for a Faculty Colloquium with Sarah Bishop (Russian) who will present her talk titled: “Kama Ginkas and Contemporary Russian Theater”

My talk will introduce the work of Kama Ginkas, one of the most celebrated theater directors currently working in Russia, as well as provide a general sense of the vibrant and diverse theatrical scene in Moscow today. Born in 1941, Ginkas survived his early childhood in a Jewish ghetto in Lithuania and moved to Leningrad to study directing in 1962. His independent, innovative style made finding work difficult, and he nearly gave up on the theater in the 1970s. With a move to Moscow and the new openness of perestroika in the 1980s, however, Ginkas found his place in the Moscow Theater of the Young Spectator (MTiuZ).

Since the mid-1980s Ginkas has rarely staged traditional plays. Instead he has created his own shows based on literary texts, primarily prose. Rather than simply portraying the action of the text on the stage, however, Ginkas plays with the language itself. I will discuss Ginkas’s innovative use of language, and I will place him in the broader context of contemporary Russian theater, particularly the “new drama” movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Video clips from a variety of productions will be shown.

The talk will take place on Friday February 22at 3 p.m. in the Library Instruction Room. As usual, cookies and refreshments will be served.

Please join us for a Faculty Colloquium with Bill Smalldone (History) who will present his talk titled: “The Struggle for Equality: A Concise History of European Socialism”

European socialism arose in the maelstrom of the industrial and democratic revolutions that transformed Europe after 1750. Striving for sweeping social, economic, cultural, and political change, socialists were a diverse lot, but were generally united by principles asserting the social and political equality of all people, ideas that won the adherence of millions and struck fear in the hearts of their numerous opponents. This textbook shows how, over the course of 200 years, socialists successfully promoted the democratization of European society and a more equitable division of wealth. At the same time, it illustrates how conflicts over the means of achieving their aims divided them into rival “socialist” and “communist” currents, a rift that undercut the struggle against fascism and helped lay the groundwork for Europe’s division during the Cold War. Although for many the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s dissolution, and the rise of neo-liberal ideology pointed to the demise of socialism as a potent political force, recent developments show that such a judgment was premature. The growth of new socialist parties across Europe indicates that socialist ideas remained vibrant in the face of capitalism’s failure to solve chronic social and economic problems even before the onset of the deep global crisis of 2008-2009.

Combining an analytical narrative with a selection of primary texts and visual images, this textbook provides undergraduate students with a brief, accessible history of European socialism. It includes a concise overview of how socialist political movements have evolved over time and stresses the rich diversity that characterized socialism’s intellectual and social foundations from its beginning.

The talk will take place on Friday February 15 at 3 p.m. in the Hatfield Room. As usual, cookies and refreshments will be served.

What does it mean to teach with a focus that is simultaneously bio-regional and global? What might a place-based curriculum look like? What good ideas are out there for courses that cross multiple disciplines to address divergent problems, or engage significantly with community partners, or develop student’s ethical, civic preparation, personal growth and self direction? How can universities function as centers for public political discourse and catalysts for political action and social change?

This presentation, which grows out of research for our LARC project (2012), “Ritual, Sustainability and Community” and (Wendy’s) forthcoming book, Teaching Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences, aims to address these questions by surveying a range of pedagogical innovations across the country that fall under the rubric of “sustainability curriculum” Nationally, sustainability has begun functioning as a key innovator and instigator of systemic change across the university, causing a re-orientation of curriculum, research, pedagogy, university-community relationships, organizational change, policy, and institutional ethos. Sustainability curricular projects are on the cutting edge of pedagogical innovation, including project-based learning, place-based pedagogy, transformational learning, and partnerships with community, business, and non-profit partners. Integrating sustainability into the liberal arts provides a particularly compelling opportunity to integrate theory and practice into the liberal arts in a way that addresses increasing need for curriculum relevance, salience, and practicability.

Generation of force is critical for many processes in the cell. Central to these processes are molecular motors, biomolecules capable of creating directed motion. My lab studies myosins, a molecular motor family with members implicated in processes including muscle contraction, trafficking of cargo in the cell, and cell motility. Specifically, we seek to understand how the complex cellular environment regulates these motors. To this end, we study both purified myosins outside the cell as well as myosin motors within their cellular niche. This approach requires us to probe myosin activity at a variety of sizes and in systems of varying complexity. For example, we study both the small-scale motions (one-billionth of a meter) of individual motors, as well as the relatively large motions (one-thousandth of a meter) of ensembles of myosins in muscle fibers. In this talk, I will describe some of these studies and discuss how our results are beginning to reveal important factors in the regulation of myosins in the cell.

Please join us for the first colloquium of the Spring semester with Seth Cotlar (History) who will present his talk titled: “When I was your age…”: Nostalgic Representations of the Recent Past in American Children’s Literature, 1830-1850

This talk is part of a book project on “The Cultural History of Nostalgia in Modernizing America, 1776-1860.” I delivered this talk last summer and over the next few months I need to transform it into an essay for inclusion in a collection of essays on children’s literature in the nineteenth century. I focus primarily on Samuel Goodrich, one of the most widely-read children’s authors of the antebellum period. I pay particular attention to how he depicts the environmental destruction that has accompanied the rapid economic development of the 1820s and 30s, and I also discuss his surprisingly sympathetic depictions of displaced Native Americans.
The talk will take place on Friday February 1 at 3 pm in the Hatfield Room. As usual, cookies and refreshments will be served.

ABSTRACT:
Cases of child sexual abuse (CSA) referred to the District Attorney (DA) are not necessarily accepted for prosecution. Two pilot studies sought to investigate whether there were gender differences in whether cases of CSA referred to the DA’s office were accepted by the DA and, if they existed, what might account for gender differences in decisions to accept cases and file charges. The results of the first study indicated that cases involving male victims were significantly less likely to be accepted for prosecution than cases involving female victims. Comparisons of acceptance rates were based on expected frequencies given CSA prevalence rates by gender in the literature and on the proportion of males and females seen at a Child Abuse Assessment Center (CAAC) from where the DA referrals were obtained. The second study assessed both disclosure-related variables (assessed by content analyses of disclosures made at a CAAC) and abuse-related variables (that occurred at or near the time of the abuse) that might explain these differences. Few variables were found to significantly differentiate males’ and females’ cases; these were the relationship of the child to the perpetrator, whether the child was offended by a juvenile, whether the child told someone of the abuse, pornography exposure, whether the child displayed concerning behaviors, and whether the child was questioned about possible abuse. Implications of these results are discussed.

Please join us on Friday, November 16th at 3 p.m. in the Hatfield Room for this week’s Faculty Colloquium being presented by David Gutterman, Associate Professor of Politics.

Title: Obama Fought the Battle of Jericho

Abstract: In his first campaign for President, Barack Obama described himself not just as part of the Joshua Generation, but as the American Joshua – prepared, able, and destined to lead the nation beyond the place of Moses on the mountaintop down into the promised land. In part, this portrayal was indicative of Obama’s determination to write himself into the American story, but this story of Joshua is also an effort to tell the nation a story about itself. From his March 5, 2007 speech in Selma, Alabama where he positioned himself figuratively as a son of the civil rights activists to his November 4, 2008 acceptance speech where he answered Sam Cooke’s plaintive hopes by declaring that “change has come to America,” Obama consciously framed his mission as fulfilling the promise of the “Moses generation.”

But this story largely disappeared once Obama began governing. Indeed, one of the remarkable – and for many disappointing – aspects of Obama’s first term in office is that despite the powerful tales he told on the campaign trail, we are still waiting for him to be, as Matt Bai wrote recently in The New York Times, the “narrator in chief.” Even on the campaign trail in 2012, Obama rarely ascended to the heights of his power as storyteller that he demonstrated in the previous campaign – and he never returned to the story of Moses and Joshua. In this essay I address the disappearance of this political narrative during Obama’s term as President and in his campaign for re-election. Is this failure to tell this resonant political narrative indicative of a problem in the story itself – or in the storyteller?

Please joins us on Friday, November 9th at 3 p.m. in Cone Chapel for this week’s Faculty Colloquium. Me (Brenda Ueland), a song cycle for piano and voice composed by Libby Larsen and published in 1994; performed by pianist, Marva Duerksen and soprano, Christine Elder.

Brenda Ueland (1891-1985), an American journalist, editor, freelance writer, and teacher of writing, is best known for her book If You Want To Write: A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit. Carl Sandburg liked it so much that he claimed “it was the best book ever written on how to write.” In the unrelated field of Arctic exploration, Brenda is famous for her letter exchange with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen. Only his letters to her survive, but they are so explicit in their sexual details that one must be over 18 to read them at the Minnesota Historical Society!

All of this brings us to our presentation for Friday’s faculty colloquium. Here, you will encounter Brenda Ueland through the words of her autobiography, Me: A Memoir (1939), excerpts from which comprise the text for American composer Libby Larsen’s marvelous song cycle for soprano and piano. Ueland was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota into a relatively progressive family in which her father was a prominent lawyer and judge and her mother a suffragette and first president of the Minnesota League of Women Voters. After completing her baccalaureate at Barnard College, Ueland spent some years in New York and its environs working as a staff writer, composing scripts for radio broadcasts, and eventually teaching writing classes. She married three times, had one child and, by her own account, numerous lovers. Her autobiography details elements of her childhood, time in college, life in Greenwich Village, and various love affairs. In our reading of Ueland’s autobiography, we have found Ueland to be engagingly self-confident, witty, insightful, and wise, but never preachy. As Libby Larsen explains in a note to the published score of her cycle: “Ueland’s gist is to confirm in us the true art into which we are all born, the art of living.”

Dr. Jodi Magness
Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In this slide-illustrated lecture, we survey Jewish tombs and burial customs in Jerusalem in the time of Jesus, and consider the archaeological and literary evidence for the burials of Jesus and his brother James. The lecture includes a discussion of the claims surrounding the so-called “James ossuary” and the “Talpiyot tomb” (recently said to be the tomb of Jesus and his family).

Title: What is QR? Quantitative Reasoning: “As If Your Life Depended on It”

Abstract:
Mathematics and science requirements have long been standard components of the undergraduate curriculum, and specific applications of mathematical tools and scientific reasoning permeate work in many disciplines. Recent discussions of liberal education goals have begun to reframe some of the justification for these courses in terms of the importance of “quantitative reasoning” (QR) and “quantitative literacy,” and yet the significance of the broader meaning behind these new labels is not widely understood. If QR is not simply “math” or “science,” then what is it? In this faculty colloquium, I hope to take up the conceptual issues underlying the recent changes in terminology and discuss their implications for general education (including Willamette’s current revision efforts). In doing so, I will be drawing examples and illustrations from health care and medical decision making as a way of illustrating why your life might, indeed, depend on QR.